What is a Frame Drum
A frame drum is one of the oldest instruments in human history. Older than written language. Older than most of what we consider civilisation.
At its simplest, a frame drum is a skin stretched over a shallow circular frame - held in one hand, played with the other. The design has changed very little in thousands of years. What has changed is where it has been found, and who has been playing it.
A Global Instrument
Frame drums appear across an extraordinary range of cultures and time periods - in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome, across the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa, and into Europe. They appear in archaeological records, in sculpture, in painting, in temple imagery. They are not owned by any one tradition.
What this tells us is something important - that humans across vastly different cultures and geographies independently arrived at the same instrument. The frame drum is not a cultural curiosity. It is something closer to a human universal.
The Women’s Instrument
Historian and musician Layne Redmond spent much of her life researching the ancient history of the frame drum, and what she found was striking. In many of the oldest records we have - particularly across the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East - the frame drum was primarily played by women. Priestesses, ritual specialists, healers. Women in roles of spiritual and ceremonial authority.
The drum was not merely an instrument in these contexts. It was a tool of connection - between the community and the sacred, between the living and the ancestors, between ordinary time and ritual time.
This history has largely been forgotten. But it has not disappeared. Many people - particularly women - who encounter a frame drum for the first time describe a sense of recognition rather than novelty. Something remembered rather than learned.
The Frame Drum Today
The frame drum is experiencing a renaissance. It is found in shamanic practice, in sound healing, in ceremony, in personal spiritual practice. People are drawn to it from many different backgrounds and for many different reasons.
What most of them share is a sense that the drum is not simply a musical instrument - that something happens when hide is struck and sound moves through a room, through a body, through a gathering of people. Something older than any of us can quite name.
The frame drums I make are handcrafted in Coomba Park on the NSW Mid North Coast, using natural hides stretched over paulownia timber frames. If you feel drawn to explore one, you are welcome to browse what is currently available on this website.
